In his new book, Brad's Sure Guide to SQL Server Maintenance Plans, Brad McGehee takes you on a comprehensive tour of two SQL Server tools designed to help DBAs ensure that a "required minimum" level of maintenance takes place on their SQL Server instances: the Maintenance Plan Wizard and the Maintenance Plan Designer.

Millions of SQL Server instances run in the offices of small and medium-sized organizations and there are many "accidental" DBAs out there whose job it is to maintain them. Often, they find that they don't have the knowledge, experience, or critically the time, to perform the correct level of maintenance on their SQL Server databases, much as they might like to. This can mean poor performance and reduced availability. Regardless of the size of your organization, if your mission critical data becomes unavailable, then business will suffer greatly.

The Maintenance Plan Wizard and Designer allow you to configure and schedule eleven core database maintenance tasks, ranging from integrity checks, to database backups, to index reorganizations and rebuilds. Brad walks through every one of these tasks covering:

The intent of each task and why it's important

How to configure each task and what all the options mean

Scheduling considerations: when and how often should you run the task?

Customizing and extended your Maintenance Plans using the Designer

Used carefully, these Maintenance Plan tools represent powerful time-saving devices for any DBA. At each stage of the book, Brad explains clearly the correct and incorrect uses for the tool, and indicates where more advanced solutions, using T-SQL or PowerShell scripting, would be more appropriate.

Table of Contents

Chapter 01: Why is Database Maintenance Important?

Chapter 02: Before you Create any Maintenance Plans

Chapter 03: Getting Started with the Maintenance Plan Wizard

Chapter 04: Task Scheduling

Chapter 05: Check database Integrity Task

Chapter 06: Shrink Database Task

Chapter 07: Rebuild Index Task

Chapter 08: Reorganize Index Task

Chapter 09: Update Statistics Task

Chapter 10: Execute SQL Server Agent Job Task

Chapter 11: History Cleanup Task

Chapter 12: Define Back Up Database (Full) Task

Chapter 13: Define Back Up Database (Differential) Task

Chapter 14: Back Up Database (Transaction Log) Task

Chapter 15: Maintenance Cleanup Task

Chapter 16: Using the Maintenance Plan Designer

About the Author

Brad McGehee is an Industry speaker, writer, and consultant on Microsoft SQL Server, specializing in SQL Server performance tuning, clustering, and high availability. He is the founder of www.SQL-Server-Performance.Com, and oversaw its growth to 350,000 visits each month. He is now Director of DBA Education at Red Gate Software. Brad is a frequent speaker at SQL PASS, SQL Connections, SQL Server user groups, and other industry seminars, and he is the author or co-author of more than 12 technical books and over 100 published articles. He spends what time he has left with his family in Hawaii. He is a Microsoft SQL Server MVP, MCSE+I, MCSD, MCT

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